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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

"[An Iranian nuclear bomb] was a lot further away 15 years ago when I started talking about it. It was a lot further away 10 years ago. It was a lot further away five years. It was a lot further away five months ago. They are getting there, and they are getting very, very close."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the Sunday morning airwaves to spout tired talking points about the non-existent threat Iran's safeguarded, civilian nuclear program poses to Israel, the United States, and presumably Neptune and Krypton.

"They're edging up to the red line," Netanyahu said. "They haven't crossed it yet. They're also building faster centrifuges that would enable them to jump the line, so to speak, at a much faster rate - that is, within a few weeks." He also said Iran is "building ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] to reach the American mainland in a few years," which is a grossexaggeration, if notanoutrightimpossibility.

Dismissing the recent Iranian election as irrelevant to what he insists are devious Iranian intentions, Netanyahu called Hassan Rouhani, who will be inaugurated as Iran's new president on August 3, "a wolf in sheep's clothing," whose maniacal strategy will be, "Smile and build a bomb."

"If sanctions don't work, they have to know that you'll be prepared to take military action -- that's the only thing that will get their attention," Netanyahu said, suggesting that Iranians are subhumans who only understand grunts and shoves, rather than rational actors preserving and protecting their inalienable national rights and refusing to back down to offensive and illegal demands made by serially-aggressive nuclear-armed bullies.

Netanyahu urged the United States government to "make clear that the nuclear option" - whoops, Freudian slip of the war criminal's tongue - "the military option which is on the table is truly on the table," but lamented that there seemed to be "no sense of urgency" when it comes to stopping Iran from doing something every intelligence agency on the planet - includingIsrael's - says it's not doing.

Still, an obsession is an obsession and, at least, Netanyahu isn't ashamed of being obsessed. "Iran is the most important, the most urgent matter of all," he whined, before throwing up a silly hodgepodge of scary-sounding words in an attempt to be taken seriously. All the problems in the world - including Israel's ongoingcolonization of Palestine - won't amount to a hill of beans, he cried, if the "messianic, apocalyptic, extreme regime" in Tehran acquires "atomic bombs."

Such a ghastly scenario would present "a terrible, catastrophic change for the world and for the United States," he said, because the United States apparently isn't part of the world. (Actually, considering the isolation the United States and Israel - along with lackey states like Palau and Micronesia - face in the United Nations, Netanyahu may be on to something here.)

Unsurprisingly, "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer challenged none of Netanyahu's assertions; all the warmongering and propaganda was given a free pass. This is especially disappointing considering, in January 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told Schieffer himself when asked about Iran's alleged pursuit, "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."

Netanyahu has been leading the charge against Iran since the mid-1990s, warning of weapons programs that don't exist and calling for sanctions and explicit military threats. His talking points since then literally have not changed and are identical to those he used to encourage the United States to invade Iraq a decade ago.

Here's a reminder of why the Israeli Prime Minister's CBS interview may actually have been a rerun:

The suggestion that Iran would soon be in possession of, or be in a position to quickly manufacture, nuclear weapons has been in constant circulation for nearly three decades. In 1984, Iran was reportedly moving "very quickly" towards a nuclear weapon and could have one as early as 1986. By the early 1990's, the CIA predicted Iran was "making progress on a nuclear arms program and could develop a nuclear weapon by 2000," later changing their estimate to 2003.

Israeli estimates have always been of an especially hysterical quality. In March 1992, The Jerusalem Report, noting that "Israel keeps a wary watch on Teheran's march to the Bomb," predicted that, "[b]y the year 2000, Iran will almost certainly have the Bomb."

A few months later, Israeli Major General Herzl Budinger insisted that, unless "Iran's intensive effort to develop atomic weapons is not 'disrupted,'" it would "become a nuclear power by the end of the decade." Then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres shared similar assessment later that year.

On November 8, 1992, the New York Timesreported Israel was confident Iran would "become a nuclear power in a few years unless stopped." An Israeli "senior army officer" feared "the Iranians may have a full nuclear capability by the end of the decade."

On February 12, 1993, an Associated Press dispatch summarized a report from Israeli daily Maariv, which quoted "experts who predicted Tehran would have an atomic bomb within six years." One of these "experts" was Likud Party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu, who had recently claimed in an oped that Iran would have a nuclear weapon "by 1999" and would use such its "Islamic bomb" to destroy Israel.

In March 1993, a Washington Post report headlined "Israel seeking to convince U.S. that West is threatened by Iran" noted that Israeli leaders attempting to push their American counterparts into taking a stronger stance on Iran. The article quoted then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warning of "megalomaniacal" Iran intent on establishing "a Middle East empire."

The alarm was still ringing a couple of years later when, on January 11, 1995, Benjamin Netanyahu told a nearly empty Knesset hearing that "within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb, without having to import either the technology or the material."

His solution to this crisis? "[The nuclear threat] must be uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S. It necessitates economic sanctions on Iran," he declared.

By 1996, Israeli assessments put an Iranian nuclear bomb four years away. One year later, they confidently predicted it would happen by 2005. By mid-2001, Israel was still holding fast to its 2005 deadline and reaffirmed such a warning in 2003.

By 2004, however, an Israeli intelligence report determined that "within three years Iran would have the means to produce an atomic bomb by itself." In 2005, Israel's Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Iran was "less than one year away." At the same time, Israeli Military Intelligence's prediction was 2007, then 2008, later revised to 2012, then returned to 2008. In 2007, Israeli Military Intelligence said Iran would become nuclear weapons capable by mid-2009. A year later, the 2009 threshold referred to “an operable nuclear weapon,” rather than just capability.

When 2009 rolled around, then-Prime Ministerial candidate Benjamin Netanyahu told an American Congressional delegation that Israeli “experts” determined Iranian nuclear weapons capability “was probably only one or two years away,” while Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak put the window of opportunity to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons at a mere six to 18 months. At the time, Mossad chief Meir Dagan insisted, "the Iranians will have by 2014 a bomb ready to be used, which would represent a concrete threat for Israel."

Later that same year, Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, "argued that it would take Iran one year to obtain a nuclear weapon and two and a half years to build an arsenal of three weapons. By 2012 Iran would be able to build one weapon within weeks and an arsenal within six months." A month later, Netanyahu said, "Iran has the capability now to make one bomb or they could wait and make several bombs in a year or two."

By 2010, some Israeli officials said Iran was only a year away from a bomb, some said it “one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability,” and others said it still had seven years to go. An unnamed “Israeli policy maker” revealed to Jeffrey Goldberg that Iran would have a nuclear weapon "nine months from June - in other words, March of 2011." In early 2011, the prediction jumped to 2015.

Nevertheless, a year later, the Times of Londonclaimed an Israeli security report assessed Iran may become a nuclear power "within a year," a conclusion subsequently confirmed by Ehud Barak. Six months later, in mid-2012, Barak suggested that it would take “several years” for Iran to “turn nuclear.” Shortly thereafter, Netanyahu reportedly put the “red line” of Iranian nuclear capability at just “a few months away,” later telling the United Nations in September (along with his trusty cartoon bomb drawing) that Iran would have “enough enriched uranium for the first bomb” by mid-to-late 2013. By October, Ehud Barak added an extra “eight to 10 months” to the timeline.

Accompanying all of these predictions, of course, have been fever-pitched threats of an ever-imminent Israeli military strike on Iran and its nuclear infrastructure. In 2012, the predictions of such an illegal assault were especially incessant. Not a month went by without hysterical rumors of a new Middle East war in the offing.

This past January, a new prediction emerged. McClatchy Newspapersreported that "Israeli intelligence officials now estimate that Iran won't be able to build a nuclear weapon before 2015 or 2016, pushing back by several years previous assessments of Iran's nuclear ambitions." The report is based on "[i]ntelligence briefings given to McClatchy over the last two months" which "confirmed that various officials across Israel's military and political echelons now think it's unrealistic that Iran could develop a nuclear weapons arsenal before 2015. Others pushed the date back even further, to the winter of 2016."

In early March 2013, Netanyahu claimed that "Iran is getting closer" to his self-determined "red line" of nuclear weapons capability and is "putting itself in a position to cross that line very quickly once it decides to do so." Later that same month, in a joint press conference in Jerusalem with President Obama, Netanyahu warned of "Iran's relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons" before reiterating his position that "in order to stop Iran's nuclear programs peacefully, diplomacy and sanctions must be augmented by a clear and credible threat of military action." Soon thereafter, the Israeli press publicized claims by anonymous Israeli officials that "Iran could have the capability to build a nuclear bomb by July."

Well, it's July, so Netanyahu tells us Iran is getting "closer and closer."

Sadly, Netanayhu's tired propaganda never seems to elicit the glazed-over, yawning-inducing dismissal from the U.S. press that it so sorely deserves; rather, he gets to schedule high-profile interviews on major networks whenever he wants to reissue his warmongering bromides.

A diplomatic cable sent from sent from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in 2005, published by Wikileaks, noted that, despite Israeli warnings that Iran would reach a critical nuclear weapons capability within six months, some Israeli "officials admitted informally that these estimates need to be taken with caution. The head of the MFA's [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] strategic affairs division recalled that GOI assessments from 1993 predicted that Iran would possess an atomic bomb by 1998 at the latest."

Another cable from 2009 wondered whether "the Israelis firmly believe" their hysterical predictions about Iran's nuclear progress "or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States."

In truth, Netanyahu himself is increasingly viewed as an Israeli Chicken Little. In early 2013, McClatchy Newspapersreported that Israeli officials "have said there's a widening gulf between Netanyahu's remarks and the intelligence reports he receives," and quoted one unnamed "intelligence officer" as wondering, "Did we cry wolf too early?"

While the alarmism will surely continue unabated, the answer is obvious.

*****

UPDATE: Neocon ideologue Elliott Abrams used some of the same formulations as Netanyahu when quoted in a 2010 Washington Postarticle. "The clock keeps ticking, and Iran gets closer and closer to a bomb," he said.

When will we start seeing some new talking points?

Of course, this phrase may best be remembered as it appeared in George W. Bush's infamous "Axis of Evil" State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002:

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.

Words of the Wiser

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."- Mark Twain

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."- Howard Zinn

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."- Malcolm X

"The roots of violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles."- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."- Albert Einstein

"Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war."- Sigmund Freud

"We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility.- Paul Robeson

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."- Anne Frank

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being."- Kahlil Gibran

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."- Abraham Lincoln

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive...those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."- C.S. Lewis

"Fascism is capitalism plus murder."- Upton Sinclair

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."- Frederick Douglass

"If I sit silently, I have sinned."- Mohammad Mossadegh

"One must always try to be as radical as reality itself."- Vladimir Lenin

"They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority."- Gerald Massey

"Social equality is the only basis of human happiness."- Nelson Mandela

"I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think."- Marshall McLuhan

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad."- James Madison

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rock fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty."- Henry David Thoreau

"There can be no peace until the forces of oppression are overthrown."- Albert Luthuli

"Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization."- Eugene V. Debs

"The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all members."- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."- George Orwell

"There's no hope, but I may be wrong."- Pete Seeger

"I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop."- Rachel Corrie

"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."- Thomas Jefferson

"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive."- Simone de Beauvoir

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."- Arthur Schopenhauer

"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."- Blaise Pascal

"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."- Hannah Arendt

"A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism."- Simón Bolívar

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."- Voltaire

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."- James Baldwin

"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."- Milan Kundera

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."- Alexis de Tocqueville

"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."- Herman Melville

"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made."- Franz Kafka

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."- Arthur Miller

"Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country."- Michel de Montaigne

"Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation."- Arundhati Roy

"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."- Rosa Luxemburg

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."- John Steinbeck

"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."- Noam Chomsky

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."- H.L. Mencken

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."- Aldous Huxley

"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."- Bertrand Russell

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."- Desmond Tutu

"Every empire...tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."- Edward Said

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."- Dante Alighieri

"When fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."- Sinclair Lewis

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious."- Smedley Butler

"The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital... This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.- Rutherford B. Hayes

"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk."- John Milton

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."- Max Planck

"With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation."- Paulo Freire

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."- Robert M. Hutchins

"I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring."- Erich Maria Remarque

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."- Albert Camus

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."- Thomas Paine"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men."- Edward R. Murrow

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."- Emma Goldman

"Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors."- Lewis H. Lapham"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."- Gloria Steinem

"Activism is my rent for living on this planet."- Alice Walker

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."- Woody Allen

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.- Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

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